It's hard to reduce anything by 90% – and waste to landfill is especially tricky. But that goal is what Los Angeles-based retail supplier, Farmer Brothers, has been working on for the last few years. The size of the reduction is ambitious. Even more remarkable, though, is that this initiative did not originate in the company's sustainability department, the facilities crew, or even the CEO. Instead the leader was an inspired product manager named Sarah Beaubien.

Beaubien wasn't only a product manager. She could also be called a corporate social "intrapreneur", or a person who creates meaningful change within existing companies.

In her early career, Beaubien dabbled in a number of fields, including high school education and content marketing. Then in 2006, she decided to try something different and became an account manager for Farmer Brothers.

Working in the coffee business enabled Beaubien to get close to issues she cared about, such as fair wages for farmers, but her personal passion for environmental sustainability inspired her to do more. She was surprised by the huge volume of waste her company sent to the landfill – over 70% of its waste, which included at least 15,000lbs of coffee chaff each month.

Beaubien started researching ideas about how the company could operate more sustainably, using resources like the Impact at Work toolkit to introduce waste reduction ideas to management that would build a solid foundation. Beaubien then recruited more than 20 other employees across the Portland site to launch a waste management initiative.

Over the past four years, these employees have repurposed or recycled about 60% of headquarters' waste, creating a model for other Farmer Brother sites to follow. At the same time, Beaubien's team has helped the company significantly reduce costs and create additional revenue streams by selling waste to those who can use it.

What helped make her successful? Beaubien points to a few key pieces of advice for her efforts.

Think outside the bag

To start, Beaubien noticed that some items in the coffee company's waste stream are just not recyclable or compostable, such as the 300,000 burlap bags that the company uses each year to ship coffee beans. Instead of giving up, Beaubien's team advertised the free bags on Craigslist, and now has a wait list of farmers, companies, and others willing to pick up the burlap bags and repurpose them.

Be adaptive

After the waste reduction efforts had launched, Beaubien and her team created a training curriculum for employees on the new waste management practices. But even after the training was delivered, waste audits discovered a lot of items still ending up in their landfill that could be recycled or composted. People forgot the nuances. In response, the sustainability team switched the approach, launching a fun campaign to incentivize ceramic cup use over paper and creating life-size visuals for how many paper cups they prevented from going to the landfill.

Celebrate the small wins

The sustainability team recognized that some of their requests to fellow employees were hard, and required semi-painful changes in behavior. So the group built in celebratory moments as well. For example, after launching alternative transportation days, the team made sure to provide prizes like a pizza party to both celebrate the cause and raise awareness.

Beaubien aims to build the company into an environmental leader. And in the future, she can do this officially on the job, since her leadership in this project resulted in a new role: director of sustainability.

"We want our company to be setting a new standard for manufacturing waste streams," says Sarah. "Our ultimate goal is zero waste to landfill by 2015 for all Farmer Brothers sites."

Liz Maw is the CEO of Net Impact, a non-profit that works within and beyond business to create a sustainable future. Net Impact received sponsorship from TD Bank to support its reporting on intrapreneurs